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Physics Analysis: Tesla Cybertruck vs. Porsche 911
Here’s the headline: “The Cybertruck beats a Porsche 911 while towing a Porsche 911”. It’s a pretty catchy title. But is it true? Perhaps not.
In this Tesla video, it shows a race between a Cybertruck and a 911 with the Cybertruck also a 911.
However, as demonstrated by Engineering Explained (Jason Fenske)— this is not over the 1/4 mile run but instead only 1/8th a mile. This leads to the next question: would the Cybertruck still win in the full 1/4 mile? Jason says that it would not. I still can’t believe Tesla lied about their video being 1/4th a mile. That’s whack.
I think Jason’s video is quite nice, but I wasn’t completely happy with his analysis. That means I’m just going to have to do it myself. For fun.
Let’s start with a video analysis of the race from the Tesla video. Just as Jason does, I’m going to find the 1/8th mile times for the two cars. You don’t have to literally count frames like he does — instead you can get a program to do it for you. I really like Tracker Video Analysis — it can give you position-time data from the frames in a video. From that, I get the Cybertruck time of 8.541 seconds and the 911 with 8.708 seconds. We can use this time to get the average acceleration — in just a bit.
Next, let’s find the vehicle speed when crossing the 1/8th mile mark. I can get position-time data from the video, but I need to first set the scale. We can use the listed length of 5.68 meters. With that, I get the following plot of position vs. time.
Yes, we only get three data points — but it’s enough. Since the x-velocity is the rate of change of the position, the slope of this line will give the speed with a value of 41.5 meters per second (or 92.8 mph). What about the 911? Because it’s closer to the camera, I need to rescale the video using its length of 4.52 meters. Here’s…
